This month's tool is a ready-to-use encounter form for your annual wellness visits tailored specifically for patients receiving their subsequent visit of this preventive service CMS initiated in 2011.

Be prepared to meet even stricter electronic health records (EHR) reporting requirements, but also to benefit from improved interoperability and vendor responses to specialty-specific provisions, now that CMS released its proposed rule for stage 2 meaningful use.

You won’t be able to report a key hypertension measure for the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program until April 1 and will lose all potential reporting opportunities between Jan. 1 through March 31. That could jeopardize your bonus.

Don’t assume the burden of educating patients about their payment responsibilities on your own. Instead, seek a local business partner to help you teach patients about their health plans – particularly the high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) – and you’ll improve collections and patient relations.

You’re not alone if Medicare has been denying your claims or recouping funds for place-of-service (POS) errors for your provider’s hospital services. Protect your revenue and prevent those denials by closely coordinating your practice’s billing department with the hospital’s, experts tell Part B News.

Physician practices and hospitals are rarely in sync, especially when it comes to place of service (POS) billing. And because of that, your practice stands to lose thousands of dollars because of coding errors for services your physician performed in a hospital.

It’s up to your practice to make the hospital-practice relationship more transparent.

This chart reflects how your peers wish to incorporate electronic health records (EHR) by breaking down the exact types of information they want to share with other medical offices electronically but currently share via paper, phone or fax.

How do you report an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) performed by both a neurosurgeon and orthopedic surgeon, even though they weren’t co-surgeons but simply did their respective portion of the procedure? Do you report 22551-22562 (arthrodesis procedure codes set)?

Physicians and practice managers have been trying to decide for months now whether an accountable care organization could be a viable path toward a more secure financial future, but there were plenty of reasons to be wary. The decision could be easier now that the final rule has been issued by HHS.